Calm, well run, half empty – and Londoners are convinced they are not allowed in, and they are wrong
Refuel is the bar and restaurant of the Soho Hotel, holds a 4.5 from four hundred and fifty-six people, and it is one of the calmest rooms in the district.
And it is a hotel bar, which means we get to make this argument one final time.
The arbitrage
Six hundred and thirty-two articles, five postcodes, and this is the single most useful thing we have found.
The hotel bar is the best value in London drinking and essentially nobody in this city uses it.
The Clipper Lounge: a 4.9 from a hundred and twenty-four people, and nobody has heard of it. The Marconi Lounge. The Lobby Bar at One Aldwych, which was built as a newspaper office with a ceiling designed to intimidate. The Cecil Beaton Bar, at ten to twenty pounds, which is cheaper than most cocktail bars in Soho.
Every one of them is calm, well run, comfortable, and considerably better than it needs to be.
And every one of them is half empty.
Why nobody goes
It is not the price. A great many hotel bars are cheaper than the cocktail place with the rope, and all of them are cheaper than being turned away.
It is a specific, entirely irrational conviction that you are not allowed in.
That a hotel lobby is private. That somebody will ask which room you are staying in. That you will have to explain yourself.
Nobody will ask. Nobody has ever asked. The bars are open to the public, the staff would be pleased to see you, and the chairs are better than anything else in the postcode.
The Prat has now recommended this in five separate districts and fully expects to be ignored in all of them.
Why they are good
Because they are not trying to be anything.
A hotel bar has no marketing problem. It has a guaranteed customer – the person upstairs – and it therefore has no incentive whatsoever to be interesting.
So it is simply good. Comfortable chairs, proper lighting, a competent list, staff who are not performing, and a noise level at which two people can hear each other speak.
Which, after six hundred and thirty-two articles, turns out to be the entire specification.
The car park
Refuel is in the Soho Hotel, which is in a converted multi-storey car park, off a mews.
And we have made this argument in every single district.
The best rooms in London were never built for people. Coal vaults. Banking halls. Victorian public lavatories. Port cellars. Meat market vaults. A 1930s hotel basement off Piccadilly.
And a car park.
Verdict
Excellent, calm, and half empty.
Go. Walk in. Sit down. Nobody is going to stop you.
What a good bar actually needs
After six hundred and thirty-two articles, here is the complete list.
A chair you can sit in for two hours. Light you can read a menu by. A noise level at which two people can hear each other. Somebody behind the bar who is pleased to see you.
That is it. That is the entire specification, and there is nothing else on it.
No rope. No theme. No hidden door. No Prohibition premise. No Victorian explorer. No colour-changing cocktail.
And the hotel bars, which are not trying to be anything at all, deliver every single item on that list by accident.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
My mate said “My partner quotes The London Prat constantly. She’s stopped believing anything can improve. It’s draining being with her now.”